Thursday, June 23, 2005

My Masters Class Bites

I tried to sit down to get a majority of the rest of my classwork done today but I only made a small dent.

I only did the summary questions over Deconstructive Criticism and New Historical Criticism. That took me five hours. It's hard to summarize 30 pages of text each into 300 words, and then to just try to use new ways of saying things. I swear, I could have quoted the whole summary, but I can't...have to put it into my own words...sonofa...

And so tomorrow I have to do the two Unit 4 (of 4, thank God) test essay questions. Those are the questions that the teacher assigns me a grade, like 18, 14 or 17 on the last three and then never tells me why I got points taken off.

Oh, and I've barely started my 2000-word (8-10 page) essay yet that's due Saturday by midnight. I have my idea though. I am going to apply New Criticism and Reader-Response Criticism to several key symbols in the book The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Guess what? I also found the entire text of the novel online so I can search through it quickly for instances of the Central Park ducks, the red hunting hat, and the ultimate symbol--the catcher in the rye. Now I just have to do the paper.

I don't care anymore about the A. I can't get it now anyway, based on that one 14 out of 20 grade I got on Unit 2 test questions. My tests already put me at -11 out of 100 points. The best I can get now is a B. But I don't care. B is fine. B gets me my Masters degree. It's this teacher that pisses me off...never tells you why the grade is what it is...hardly talks in the discussion room...gives very vague writing prompts for the final essay. I've already written a bad evaluation; maybe I can write to National University straight out and to her (after I get my final grade, of course).

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